QA Rollout of Chemistry Electronic Laboratory Notebook
Challenge
The client requested GGA to provide a software quality assurance service to ensure the quality of various software products that are developed and maintained within the client's organization. This software quality assurance service was designed to support the software portfolio in the following areas:
- Software projects for bioinformatics, cheminformatics, and other scientific areas.
- Software platform (i.e. SharePoint, Intranet) based projects.
- Software infrastructure projects.
One of the client's requirements was locating the service team onsite at different client locations to increase the level of collaboration and achieve higher effectiveness of the quality assurance process.
Solution
GGA established a team of software quality assurance professionals led by a validation manager. These team members were located at two major client sites in Europe and the United States, and served as part of the client's development operations group.
The GGA engineers supported the client's software engineers during the project lifecycle, assisting them in setting up the required hardware components, infrastructure, all continuous integration attributes (SVN, JIRA, Jenkins, Confluence, Nexus, Nagios, Splunk, etc.), and "standard" developer tools, as well as providing them with testing services (manual and automated testware development) for the project implementation. The regular tasks of GGA's team were the following:
- Project Infrastructure Support: Jenkins – install, configure, support as a server, support as a service for customers.
- Testing Infrastructure Support: Selenium Framework (TestNG, WebDriver 2.0) – design, implement, support.
- Adoption of Selenium Framework – for each new project, create a dedicated version of the framework, start testware development, pass testware to developers, assist developers in implementing unit tests.
- Load Testing – develop and run load tests with Visual Studio, Jmeter.
- Performance Testing – develop performance tests with Selenium + DynaTrace + ShowSlow + Spotfire Framework, run performance tests from different client's locations (Europe, United States, and China).
- Services Testing – Soap UI, Visual Studio.
- Manual Testing – develop and run tests for integration of sophisticated projects or for key client's projects.
- Publication/advertising/adoption of new features, services, projects to the client's community.
Technologies and Tools
- Integration attributes - SVN, JIRA, Jenkins, Confluence, Nexus, Nagios, Splunk.
- Frameworks – Selenium (TestNG, WebDriver 2.0).
- Tools - DynaTrace, ShowSlow, Spotfire, Soap UI, Visual Studio.
Features
The service supported several dozens of projects, including:
- Software Interaction Guide toolkit for designing corporate web applications.
- Testing of sample pages that contain all elements in the toolkit and, therefore, all objects that any client's web-based project would use.
- Integration solution binding together the eLab notebook, the application for small molecule registration in the client's in-house global ordering application, and the global ordering application.
- Web-based assay registration system that was created to allow the client's scientists to describe and register all assays used in the scientific discovery process. This system relates to multiple applications within the client's infrastructure from both dataflow and workflow perspectives.
- Web-based application for querying and reporting data that was accessed from the client's data warehouse.
Data storage and retrieval system for genomic sequence and annotations (aligning -omics data to a common sequence and coordinates).